The Cultured Mod is not intended to alter the base game experience, it is only intended to enrich it and take advantage of the core game mechanics.

-All Cultures when generated will have wildly varying values, but retain their core characteristics. For example one dwarven civilization might love nature and another might absolutely abhor the natural world, but both dwarven civilizations will admire craftsmanship. The same goes for the human, elven, goblin and the various animal people civilizations.

-All Cultures will champion Martial Prowess and their respective races have the [BENIGN] tag removed, these civilizations and their citizens are not afraid to fight!

-All Giant creatures that are non-flying and are not aquatic-only are now trainable for war! Beakdogs have also been made trainable for war.

-Elves are now the same size as humans. They are no longer Keebler elves like in vanilla dwarf fortress

-Humans may now produce Steel and Pig Iron. Just like in real life. Dwarves are still exclusive to Adamantine however.

-More pieces of armor can be made with bone/scale now. Almost everything except shields/bucklers and maybe a few other exceptions I cannot recall. But you are now fullycapable of equipping your dwarves with full bone/scale armor!

-The [PRONE_TO_RAGE] tag has been removed from goblins, instead I tweaked their aggression in their personality tokens. It wascausing them to be often times getting themselves randomly maimed in adventurer mode.

-All Cultures favor Tradition, making citizens from each culture distinct from members of the same race from a different culture.

-All Cultures have had their maximum population number reduced from 10,000 to 1,000. This allows for the player to generate more cultures on bigger game worlds with lower performance hits. I've tested this on a 15 year old laptop and the difference is night and day. If you wish to increase this cap, edit the string "[MAX_POP_NUMBER:1000]" in the file "entity_default.txt".

-All Races are modified to be strictly heterosexual, making fortresses without migrants much more feasible, keeps civilization populations up despite the 1000 cap, and it creates wide spanning family trees for legends, to delve into the histories of those you have sent to their deaths. You can also check a dwarfs family history and see how vast their family trees are if you don't believe it.

-Goblins have been modified to no longer be immortal in terms of having an uncapped age. They live from 30-40 years but now they are designed to reproduce like crazy, will often produce litters, and are far more active despite their lower lifespan. This has made traveling through goblin dark fortresses much easier in my personal experience, because now there shouldn't be thousands of goblins who did nothing for hundreds of years clogging up your CPU.

-Fixed a civilization entity token bug that was causing the game to crash in world gen almost every time.

-There are probably other changes but they are so minor I'm quite unable to remember them.

Does benign actually do anything for civilized creatures? I thought it was just for animals.

It seems to: I just made a fort, retired and adventured, experienced a world more wracked with violence than usual, then unretired after a year and found my fort swamped by 193 hostiles - almost all of them dwarven scholars and bards who just sulked on the edge of my map.

Does benign actually do anything for civilized creatures? I thought it was just for animals.

It seems to: I just made a fort, retired and adventured, experienced a world more wracked with violence than usual, then unretired after a year and found my fort swamped by 193 hostiles - almost all of them dwarven scholars and bards who just sulked on the edge of my map.

The world being more violent in worldgen could use more testing because that's interesting, but the thing with the 193 hostiles is just a bug, for some reason the game flags them as hostile even though they shouldn't be. It happens even with the benign tag.

The chance of a starting 7 not having a mating pair with only heterosexual dwarves is 1.56%, which can only happen if all starting dwarves are male or female. This does not account for personality issues or the ongoing fact that relationships don't really build in fortress mode at all.

With the default values, this raises to 3.83% as of version 0.47.01, as 5% of dwarves are not interested in the opposite sex and lovers can have children, now. Yes, you read that right, 5%. Making all creatures strictly heterosexual increases total breeding rates by 5.2%. Thus do I find this claim:

Quote

keeps civilization populations up despite the 1000 cap, and it creates wide spanning family trees for legends, to delve into the histories of those you have sent to their deaths

The chance of a starting 7 not having a mating pair with only heterosexual dwarves is 1.56%, which can only happen if all starting dwarves are male or female. This does not account for personality issues or the ongoing fact that relationships don't really build in fortress mode at all.

With the default values, this raises to 3.83% as of version 0.47.01, as 5% of dwarves are not interested in the opposite sex and lovers can have children, now. Yes, you read that right, 5%. Making all creatures strictly heterosexual increases total breeding rates by 5.2%.

Except that's not how it really works, because entities are assigned a sexual orientation when they find a successful pairing, and if you have a few potential pairings that will result in reproduction, the rest of the fortress will continually roll until they pair. Entities continually seeking pairings will eventually end up in a non-reproductive relationship which is permanent, as most entities will only have 1 relationship for the rest of their lives, this means that on a long enough time scale, an entire fortress could end up being non-reproductive. This can be a huge issue if you are playing in a fort that is autonomous and sealed from the rest of the world, or you are in a dying civilization. This measure ensures that they will reproduce 100% of the time a pairing is found, and that future migrant waves will only increase the amount of potential pairings.

If relationships granting an orientation token were not permanent or if the token were assigned by some other means, this measure would not be necessary, but I've personally noticed a huge difference as far as fort births go. The vanilla setting also has a rate of failed initial pairings, even if the pairings are of the opposite sex and would otherwise result in reproduction, this mod sets that rate to 0, thus further increasing the rate of population growth.

All of what you said is completely wrong, actually. Units are assigned an orientation as soon as they are generated, Not as soon as they find a successful pairing. Units no longer only have one relationship for most of their lives, As you will find if you check Legends mode in 47.01.

I have no idea where you got the idea that their generated as soon as they have a relationship. You can check orientation with DF hack and you've been able to do so since 2014. I personally did the research into how orientation is assigned for dfhack and dwarf therapist, and I can say unequivocally that orientation is assigned at unit creation, IE birth or migration or being made into a historical figure.

Units no longer only have one relationship for most of their lives, As you will find if you check Legends mode in 47.01.

I was not aware of this change! However I do know that the orientation token weighs chances for opposite sex attraction and failure for pairing and for assigning a relationship to the same sex. You can play with the token yourself and see for your own eyes how it works. Unless they've made orientation birth specific since the new update, that is how it worked before.

Unless they've made orientation birth specific since the new update, that is how it worked before.

It has absolutely never been the case, and you can check this all the way back to 0.40.01. Units have an orientation_flags bitfield in their personality which is present in both their soul and historical figure, and that is what determines orientation. It exists as soon as they are created. You can check the contents of it with the "gaydar" script for DFHack... which I wrote, before we even knew what the orientation_flags was, because I was the person who did the initial research into how orientation works.

All I can say that from my testing experience, it had made a huge difference! Even if the net positive is very small as you claim, I still think some players might be interested in that! I know I personally noticed a huge difference in populations with the use of the orientation token, and if all of their souls are consigned to token, pre-birth, and not when attempting to pair as you say, than so be it!It makes no difference at the end of the day, besides the mod has other stuff to offer like wildly varying cultures with more aggressive core races. And if statistics are anything to go by, 5% on a time scales that spans hundreds of years involving thousands upon thousands of entities makes a big difference!

If you want to make a version of the mod that has the vanilla orientation settings, feel free! but please give credit and let people know about the changes.Have a nice day!

Alright, did some actual testing, including hacking dwarves to be various sexualities: even if I made every single one fully bisexual and had only two men out of 7, I still got more babies than I wanted, because... well, turns out a lot of babies happen in general, because units are far, far more likely to take lovers and will take far more lovers than before. I'd say the effect is negligible if it exists at all.